Abstract 3: Science at the speed of sport: Improving the quality of applied research with elite sport systems

The speed of high-performance sport is more rapid than ever, driven by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of accessible data about athlete performance, health, and development. As a result, those involved with the delivery of high-performance sport (e.g., coaches, administrators, trainers) are increasingly pressured to make modifications to athlete training to take advantage of scientific advancements. As researchers who actively engage with sport practitioners in various forms, we have noted the movement away from traditional approaches to scientific research and discourse in many organizations, toward approaches focusing on ‘in house’ or ‘embedded’ scientists who work exclusively with a specific sport (or multiple, usually related, sports). While the ultimate reasons for this movement are hard to discern (e.g., they are driven, at least in part, by the large amounts of data available for sport practitioners and the increasing need to determine how to integrate this data into practice as rapidly as possible), they can promote ‘siloed’ approaches to complex problems. In this presentation, we examine the current landscape of high-performance sport research and explore ways to integrate elements of sport psychology and motor behaviour research to inform more sophisticated models of athlete learning and development. While the benefits and advantages of integrated approaches will need to be balanced against the rapidly evolving constraints of contemporary high-performance sport, they have the potential to provide superior foundations for capturing the complexity and nuance of high-performance athlete development.